no-op build - no files are compiled (none changed since last execution)

So an "incremental test runner" will only re-execute tests that were affected
by changes in the source code since last successful execution.

How it works ?

pytest-incremental is a pytest plug-in.
So if you can run your test suite with pytest you can use pytest-incremental.

Note that pytest has support to run standard unittest's and nose's tests.
So even if you don't use pytest as a test framework you might be able to
use it as a test runner.

The plug-in will analyze your python source files and through its imports
define the dependencies of the modules.
doit is used to keep track of
the dependencies and save results.
The plug-in will modify how pytest collect your tests.
pytest do the rest of the job of actually running the tests and
reporting the results.

Install

pytest-incremental is tested on python 2.6, 2.7.

pip install pytest-incremental`

python setup.py install

local installation

You can also just grab the plug-in
module
file and put in your project path.
Then enable it (check pytest docs).

Usage

Just pass the parameter --incremental when calling from the command line:

$ py.test --incremental

You can also enable it by default adding the following
line to your pytest.ini:

[pytest]
addopts = --incremental

watched packages

By default all modules collected by py.test will be used as dependencies
if imported. In order to limit or extend the watched folders you must use
the parameter --watch-path

This can be used in case you want to watch for changes in modules that are
in another project.
For example if you are testing my_lib and want to check for changes
in dependencies from your py3rd package:

It is required to use --watch-path because the source files will not
be collected by py.test

You should call:

$ py.test --incremental --watch-pkg my_lib tests/test_foo.py

dependencies

You can check what are the actual dependencies detected by running the command:

$ py.test --list-dependencies

for better visualization you can create a graph file in "dot" format
(see graphviz

$ py.test --graph-dependencies
$ dot -Tpng -o imports.png imports.dot

You can also check what are the outdated tests without executing them:

$ py.test --list-outdated

Limitations

pytest-incremental looks for imports recursively to find dependencies (using AST). But given the very dynamic nature of python there are still some cases that a module can be affected by a module that are not detected.

from package import * modules imported from __all__ in a package are not counted as a dependency

modules imported not using the import statement

modules not explicitly imported but used at run-time (i.e. conftest.py when running your tests with pytest)

monkey-patching. (i.e. A imports X. B monkey-patches X. In this case A might depend on B)